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User:Ocaasi

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email: jorlowitz(_AT_)gmail.com
I founded The Wikipedia Library: reach out to wikipedialibrary(_AT_)wikimedia.org or User:Samwalton9 (WMF) for help.
I run WikiBlueprint: a mission-aligned Wikipedia strategic consultancy


Jake Orlowitz (User:Ocaasi) founded The Wikipedia Library and ran it from 2011-2019. By the time he left the program at the Wikimedia Foundation, TWL had a half-million dollar budget and 6-person team on 4 continents. Through The Wikipedia Library, Jake developed partnerships with 70 leading scholarly publishers to provide free access to 100,000 scholarly journals and reference texts. 25,000 editors now have access to those sources through the Wikipedia Library Card Platform. Jake created the viral #1Lib1Ref and #1Bib1Ref citation campaigns, which now add 10-20 thousand new references each year from librarians around the world to Wikipedia. He started the Wikipedia Visiting scholar program, the Books & Bytes newsletter, the Wikipedia + Libraries facebook group, the Wikimedia and Libraries Usergroup, and the @WikiLibrary Twitter account.

Jake negotiated the collaboration with Turnitin to fix copyright violations on Wikipedia, started collaboration with Internet Archive to rescue 10 million dead citation links, integrated OCLC ISBN citation data into Wikipedia's reference autogeneration interface, and began a project to add Citoid to Wikidata. He developed the OAbot web app, and is a founding member of the Open Scholarship Initiative. He co-released a dataset of Wikipedia's most cited sources and the proportion of free-to-read sources on Wikipedia. Jake created The Wikipedia Adventure interactive guided tutorial and facilitated the first-ever for-credit Wikipedia editing course at Stanford Medical School. He is an English Wikipedia Administrator. 2-time Wikimedia Foundation grantee, former Individual Engagement Grants Committee member, founding board member of Wiki Project Med Foundation, former Organizing Committee member for Wikicite, Linked Data 4 Libraries Program Committee member, and founder of the Wikimedia Foundation's Knowledge Integrity Program.

Jake has presented about Wikipedia, citations, and reliability at five Wikimanias, Stanford University, Internet Librarian, the American Library Association, Coalition for Networked Information, Digital Library Forum, OpenCon, OCLC, and IFLA. He is a primary author of "The Plain and Simple Conflict of Interest Guide", "Conflict of Interest editing on Wikipedia", "Librarypedia: The future of Libraries, and Wikipedia", "The New Media Coalition Horizon Report for Libraries", "The Wikipedia Adventure: Field Evaluation", "Writing an open access encyclopedia in a closed access world", ALA's "The Wikipedia Library: The world's largest encyclopedia needs a digital library, and we are building it", "You're a researcher without a library: what do you do?", the Wikipedia "Research Help" portal, "Why Medical Schools Should Embrace Wikipedia", and the MIT Press Wikipedia @20 chapter "How Wikipedia Drove Professors Crazy, Made Me Sane, and Almost Saved the Internet." He has been interviewed by Publishers weekly in "Discovery Happens Here", Tow Journalism School for "Public Record Under Threat", and was featured in the documentary "Paywall: The Business of Scholarship."

Since starting open knowledge Wikipedia consulting agency WikiBlueprint, Jake has been featured with Jimmy Wales on NPR's TED Radio Hour "The Public Commons". He hosted the Whose Knowledge? Decolonizing the Internet's Languages Podcast. For the WayBack Machine, he helped change Wikimedia's Global Bot Policy to gain InternetArchiveBot Global Approval for expansion to over 300 language wikis. Jake oversaw the Anti-Defamation League's Wikipedia Election Democracy Project and led the rebrand from Open Access Button to OA.Works. He supervised two Wikipedians in Residence at Annual Reviews, advised Harvard University on their Wikipedia Engagement, worked with the Linux Foundation to draft a key article on computer science, and taught the Wikipedian in Residence at Milton Public Library. Jake led fundraising for Wiki Project Med Foundation, coordinated the Wikipedia:Vaccine Safety Project for NewsQ and Hacks/Hackers, and recruited and trained the Wikipedian in Residence for Perez Art Museum Miami.

Jake oversaw the Wikipedian in Residence for Latino Culture and Community at Equis, launched Internet-In-A-Box into the Wikimedia Foundation store (and featured on BoingBoing), and appeared in the new book "Verified: How to Think Straight, Get Duped Less, and Make Better Decisions about What to Believe Online". He is the Vice Chair of the Smithsonian's Biodiversity Heritage Library working group and oversaw their Wikipedian in Residence program. He is also a member of the WikiConference North American Program Committee, and built (with James Hare) the Citation Watchlist (WP:WATCHCITE).

  • "I call this Revolution 2.0. Revolution 2.0 is, is - I say that our revolution is like Wikipedia, OK? Everyone is contributing content. You don't know the names of the people contributing the content ... This is exactly what happened... Everyone was contributing small pieces, bits and pieces. We drew this whole picture. We drew this whole picture of a revolution. And that picture - no one is the hero in that picture."
    Activist Wael Ghonim
  • "And when people did help they were given a flattering name. They weren’t called “Wikipedia’s little helpers,” they were called “editors.” It was like a giant community leaf-raking project in which everyone was called a groundskeeper. Some brought very fancy professional metal rakes, or even back-mounted leaf-blowing systems, and some were just kids thrashing away with the sides of their feet or stuffing handfuls in the pockets of their sweatshirts, but all the leaves they brought to the pile were appreciated. And the pile grew and everyone jumped up and down in it having a wonderful time. And it grew some more, and it became the biggest leaf pile anyone had ever seen anywhere, a world wonder."
    The Charms of Wikipedia
  • "What are we going to do tonight, Brain? Same thing we do every night, Pinky, try and take over the world."
    Pinky and the Brain
  • "Silly is you in a natural state, and serious is something you have to do until you can get silly again."
    Mike Meyers
  • "You see, Wikipedia brings people together. It brought me together. It just takes some time for everyone to get their heads on straight, before they can see that their lives too have a mission, and an [edit] button."
    Journey of a Wikipedian
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